Knowledge that Transforms

Presents a rigorous and balanced presentation of international financial markets and international corporate finance. Takes a unified approach based on arbitrage-fee pricing. Includes an in-depth discussion of the economic role of the forward rate and the value of the forward contract, a comprehensive discussion of when and why the firm can increase its value by hedging foreign exchange risk, an economic analysis of the various payment and credit insurance techniques used in international trade, and more. Over 400 end-of-chapter problems test studentsAE understanding of concepts.

When the underlying price process is a one-dimensional diffusion, as well as in certain restricted stochastic volatility settings, a contingent claim's delta is bounded by the infimum and supremum of its delta at maturity. Further, if the claim's payoff is convex (concave), the claim's price is a convex (concave) function of the underlying asset's value. However, when volatility is less specialized, or when the underlying process is discontinuous or non-Markovian, a call's price can be a decreasing, concave function of the underlying price over some range, increasing with the passage of time, and decreasing in the level of interest rates.

Past research explains observed spreads between futures and forward Eurodollar yields as being due to the futures contract's mark‐to‐market feature. We derive closed form solutions for this yield spread and show that, theoretically, it should be small. Also, differences in liquidity, taxation, and default risk cannot account for the large spreads observed. We also present evidence that the spreads, which are nonnegligible primarily in the first half of the sample period, are likely to be attributable to the mispricing of futures contracts relative to the forward rates and that the mispricing was gradually eliminated over time.

Considering noise traders as agents with unpredictable beliefs, we show that in an imperfectly competitive market with risk averse investors, noise traders may earn higher expected utility than rational investors. This happens when, by deviating from the Nash equilibrium strategy, noise traders hurt rational investors more than themselves. It follows that the willingness of arbitrageurs to exploit noise traders' misperceptions is lower relative to a perfectly competitive economy. This result reinforces the theory that noise trading may explain closed‐end fund discounts and small firms' returns, since these markets are less competitive than the market for large firms' stock.

The availability of tax‐exempt financing provides nonprofit (NP) organizations with their own tax‐based incentives to issue debt. In this article, we develop a theoretical model in which NPs gain an indirect arbitrage from tax‐exempt debt issuance, constrained by: 1) the requirement that fixed investment exceed tax‐exempt debt flows (the project financing constraint), and 2) the constraint against share issuance. These constraints cause them to impute tax benefits to projects that afford access to the tax‐exempt bond market. Empirical tests indicate that NP hospitals behave as if they have target levels of tax‐exempt debt. Debt targeting is constrained by the availability of capital projects, while excess debt capacity stimulates investment.

This article provides the causes and symptoms of special repo rates in a competitive market for repurchase agreements. A repo rate is, in effect, an interest rate on loans collateralized by a specific instrument. A “special” is a repo rate significantly below prevailing market riskless interest rates. This article shows that specials can occur when those owning the collateral are inhibited, whether from legal or institutional requirements or from frictional costs, from supplying collateral into repurchase agreements. Specialness increases the equilibrium price for the underlying instrument by the present value of savings in borrowing costs associated with the repo specials.

We study an intertemporal asset market where insiders coexist with “non‐fundamental” speculators. Non‐fundamental speculators possess no private information on fundamental values of assets, but have superior knowledge about some aspect of the market environment. We show that the entry of these (rational) speculators can lead to reductions in market liquidity and in the information content of prices, even in an efficient market. Also, equilibrium trades display patterns of empirical interest. For example, speculators appear to chase trends and lose money after market “overreactions,” while insiders trade as contrarians and profit after such overreactions.

We simultaneously address three basic issues regarding the corporation: the optimal scope of operation, the optimal financial structure, and the relationship between these two. The starting point is that financial structure serves as a bonding device on the managers' self‐interest behavior. The effectiveness of this bonding depends on the distribution of the firm's future cash flow, which in turn depends on the firm's scope. Our theory also links the firm's investment decisions to its operation scope. As empirical implications, the theory reconciles the failure of the 1960s U.S. conglomerates with the success of the Japanese Keiretsu .